At the AV Club: Ken Jennings's Fun New Book On Received Parental Wisdom

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At the AV Club: Penn Jillette's new booklike object, reviewed

I haven't written for them in a while, so here's my first piece for the AV Club since April or so.

The Moviegoer: May - August 2010

I started this post two months ago!  But I didn't finish it before I moved cross-country and failed to finish anything.  And I have, unfortunately, been very bad about keeping accurate records of my media consumption over the last few months.  But here's what I have, following from the last installment here.

30. The Informant!: B+
31. Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans: B-
32. The Abyss: D
33. Recount: B+
34. Last Tango In Paris: C+
35. Hellboy II: The Golden Army: B
36. You Don't Know Jack: B+
37. Rosemary's Baby: A+
38. Moon: B+
39. Zombieland: B+
40. Observe and Report: F
41. Becket: B+
42. Knife In The Water: A
43. The Ladykillers (2004): C-
44. The Best Years Of Our Life: B
45. Ghost Town: B-
46. Putney Swope: C
47. The Dead: A
48. The Asphalt Jungle: A
49. Frost/Nixon: B
50. Greaser's Palace: B+
51. They Live By Night: B+
52. Castle In The Sky: A-
53. Humpday: A-
54. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: B
55. The Incredible Hulk: B
56. Funny People: B
57. X Men Origins: Wolverine: D
58. Temple Grandin: B+
59. Orphan: C+
60. John Adams: B+
61. To Kill a Mockingbird: B+
62. Toy Story 3: A
63. MST3K: Secret Agent Super Dragon: B
64. Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic: B-
65. Jason and the Argonauts: B+
66. The Lavender Hill Mob: B+
67. Godzilla: King of the Monsters: B+
68. Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior: B
69. A Town Called Panic: A
70. Louis CK: Chewed Up: A-
71. For All Mankind: A-
72. MST3K: The Beatniks: B-
73. Monkey Business: A

Books Read:

1 Dead In Attic by Chris Rose
The Hundred Days by Patrick O'Brien
Across The Great Divide: The Band And America by Barney Hoskyns
Come Along With Me by Shirley Jackson
Anathem by Neal Stephenson

The Moviegoer: March - April 2010

March and April were busy months with the packing and moving and prepping the house for the market.  But I did catch a few movies and read a few books.  Picking up from last time:

Movies (not all were first viewings)

17. The Killers: B+
18. A Perfect Couple: C- (blah, first of two terrible Altman films)
19. H.E.A.L.T.H.: D (gah)
20. Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback: B
21. Bad Day At Black Rock: B
22. A Serious Man: A+
23. Near Dark: C+
24. The Passion of Joan Of Arc: A+
25. Lola Montes: B+
26. Alphaville: B+
27. The Friends Of Eddie Coyle: A-
28. X Files: I Want To Believe: C
29. Hubble 3D: B

Books (Jan - Feb):
1. Against The Day - Pynchon
2. Chronic City - Lethem (both reviewed here)
3. Farber on Film - Manny Farber
4. Inherent Vice - Pynchon (both reviewed here)

(Mar - April)


5. Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists - the AV Club
6. You Don't Love Me Yet - Lethem
7. Radio City (33 1/3) - Bruce Eaton
8. Geek Love - Katherine Dunn
9. Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov

You Don't Love Me Yet

This is not an easy thing to write.  I am an unabashed fan of Jonathan Lethem’s writing, but after achronologically reading the later work Chronic City and now the novel You Don’t Love Me Yet, I cannot deny that he is in a Neil-Young-in-the-80s period of his career.  On paper You Don’t Love Me Yet should be my favorite of his novels: it is (1) about a young Superchunkish rock band, (2) dedicated to Eliot Duhan, a friend of mine and mutual friend of Lethem’s, who is also a guy I think the world of, (3) trying to capture the mostly unwritable feeling of being an individual subsuming your identity to the larger purpose of creating something as a group.

But You Don’t Love Me Yet is a disaster instead.  As with Chronic City, the protagonist--a person the novel doesn’t step away from--is quite blank and unlikeable.  There are interesting secondary characters, but they prove unknowable to this protagonist.  And the fundamental conflict that drives the story is a nonstarter.  Both of these novels seem like they should work, but neither has the passion to engage me as a reader.  As someone who wants to enjoy Lethem’s writing no matter what, a fan as I am a fan of Neil Young’s, I cannot help but be disappointed.

I’m willing to grant that my expectations might put me at fault for my failure to enjoy these books, but that’s really a backhanded slap at the man when I’d rather approach this directly.  Lethem built an increasingly solid body of work in the 90s through the masterful Motherless Brooklyn and the jaggedly brilliant The Fortress Of Solitude.  Then he won a MacArthur genius grant, which isn’t just confirmation of his brilliance but, unfortunately, a gift that bestows extra weight on the man’s work afterwards.  And it’s possible that after The Fortress of Solitude, an intensely personal examination of his own sense of identity and loss, his obsessive intellect hasn’t found another subject painful enough to lend to his writing the necessary catharsis.  Perhaps - and I feel like a cad for suggesting this, but this is my uninformed conclusion nevertheless - Lethem is simply too happy to write a good novel right now.

Or, at least, under the model that his prior novels were written.  There’s always the rip-up-the-rule-book-and-start-over option.

As a fan, do I want more of Lethem’s great work?  Yes, certainly.  But as a human being, would I rather read Lethem being great or would I rather he be a happy man?  The latter, definitely.  But what I don’t want is this middle ground of novels that feel unengaged and half-written.  Lethem, don’t make David Geffen sue your ass to get your muse working again.  Neil Young had a handful of great albums left in him after the 80s before he settled for turning out elder statesman-style mediocrities.  So either bring the pain or write essays, but don't settle for Are You Passionate?-type crap. 

Negative Space: Farber On Film and Inherent Vice

I wonder what Manny Farber thought about Thomas Pynchon.  There's no question that the guy had an opinion because he had an opinion about everything, although he took great pains to make his position as abstract as possible.  But Farber On Film doesn't include any of Farber's writing on art and I don't believe that he wrote about literature at all, so it is possible that I will never know what Farber actually thought about Pynchon unless Jonathan Rosenbaum or another such friend of Farber's drops by to chat.

Luckily, I have the power of conjecture and no obligations to any higher authority than the proprietor of this blog, who is, according to the note at the bottom of the page, me.  So I'll surmise that Farber read about half of Gravity's Rainbow before he got bored (too artsy, too unfocused), but he quite liked The Crying Of Lot 49 because it shared a certain willingness to parade bitingly realistic comic grotesqueries with Farber's beloved Preston Sturges, a sense of satire that went everywhere and nowhere.

Everywhere and nowhere, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out in this long essay on Farber's prickly genius, was an insult some writers directed at Farber's criticism.  Farber's writing, like his beloved category of termite art, does tend to spill out of the frame.  His points are often so mitigated that I cannot tell whether he liked a film or not.  Maybe he himself couldn't tell.  While reading this anthology, I often found myself wondering why Farber hated a certain film so much, only to find it cropping up on his year-end best-of list.  His prose is filled with reversals, though, and all of his praise is filled with faint damnation and vice versa.  What's most interesting about this book is that Farber's aesthetic philosophy seems mostly consistent and always insightful, even if his conclusions hardly ever feel conclusive.  As he outlined in his epic essay on White Elephant Art and Termite Art (in short: white elephant art is self-consciously showy grand statement art, a la Titanic, anything with Robin Williams wearing a beard, or (in my opinion) Scorcese's bombastic later films, while termite art is economical and focused on the small moments, such as in the films of Farber's beloved Val Lewton, Werner Herzog, or Howard Hawks), Farber found more significance in narrative that doesn't try to direct the observer.

Many critics disliked Farber's thesis or were disturbed by his contrarian reviews.  For instance, there's a delightful review of Farber's essay and a lively ensuing discussion at Girish here that dates back to 2006.  Worth reading for the quotes of Farber's prose as it is for the fun in the comments.  I think it's important to realize that Farber thought that both elements could coexist in the same film.  They were categories of thought, an approach rather than an either/or dichotomy system, despite what Erik Nelson writes here in Salon.  And I suspect that he hated far fewer movies than the sharp criticism of his essays would suggest.  Movies that the man apparently couldn't stand in 1942 were praised again and again in later years.  He didn't need his criticism to be conclusive, because taste is rarely fixed.  Criticism that focuses exclusively on whether an artwork is good or bad fails both reader and writer (and I realize the irony of me saying this, but hey, I'm trying).  And yet, criticism - itself an artwork - is almost always at its best when it is itself a termite art, eating its own boundaries in the pursuit of greater human experience.

Which brings things back to Pynchon.  After I finished Farber On Film, I launched into Pynchon's latest, Inherent Vice and  read it in three days flat.  Inherent Vice is Pynchon's least ambitious novel, basically a Chandler novel (or, worse, Carl Hiaassen) as run through the Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland filter.  Which makes it, more or less, a blood brother to The Big Lebowski.  That lack of ambition awakened my newly Farberized awareness, as did Pynchon's B-movie fixated hero, Doc Sportello.  Actually, it's not just Sportello who's constantly thinking about movies and comparing them to his (fictional) life, but many of the other characters, too.  Which makes a point about how reality was becoming more unreal in the Southern California of the late 60s (the Charles Manson trial is contemporaneous with the action and constantly on the minds of all of the characters).

Unfortunately, it has nothing to add to the paranoia-as-rational-philosophy that has been an essential component of all of Pynchon's work.  The characters, like the characters of Lot 49 and Vineland, are rightfully paranoid, rightfully assuming that their hedonism is under constant threat from forces of control and money, and rightfully too absorbed by their own drama and pursuit of happiness to do anything about it.  This time period is a vital one to understanding Pynchon, and yet he'd never visited it in any of his books.  But, coming as it does between the events of Lot 49 and the events of Vineland, one could surmise what Pynchon thought of the period without actually reading this shaggy-dog tale.  Fortunately, the book is one of the funniest and breeziest in Pynchon's work, fun enough that readers don't really need to care that this story was not one that was crying out to be told.  In his novels, Pynchon has rewritten history several times over, put magic and quantum theory to good use, fought bravely for personal freedoms, and developed a narrative style more influenced by the purely filmic storytelling of mise-en-scène and montage than any prior novelist.  The guy could churn out Doc Sportello novels every six months for the rest of his life and I'd read every single one of them, laughing my ass off.

Gravity's Rainbow, Against The Day, and Chronic City

I've considered Gravity's Rainbow to be among my favorite books since I spent a week reading it when I was 20.  I remember how overwhelming the experience was: the absence of anything approaching a traditional plot structure with seemingly disjointed episodes leading further and further into confusion, the characters hilarious and exasperating and opaque, the sublime ridiculousness of the plot points, the extremity and vulgarity in the many, many sex scenes, but more than anything Pynchon's ability to draw pure poetry and a near-gnostic wisdom from his cartoonish hyper-reality.

I'd been touched by great works of literature before, but this was the first great work of literature that fundamentally changed me. My entire way of seeing had been engulfed by Gravity's Rainbow. An arc of history had me caught in its parabola. I wondered how to dislodge myself before the inevitable crashdown. I reveled in my small freedoms. I grew more paranoid.

I wasn't previously unfamiliar with paranoid fiction.  William Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick had all had been brief obsessions, although none were capable of Pynchon's grand sweeping vision and masterful use of language. But unlike many other artworks that I thought profound, I had no interest in re-reading it anytime soon. I've likened that first read of Gravity's Rainbow to climbing Everest.  How many people suffer their way up to the peak and then think, -I'll have to do this again next year?  Not many.

I've had a hard time deciding how many times I've read Gravity's Rainbow. I did a cursory read again, some years later, although I recall rushing through many of the episodes in the earlier and later parts, only lingering over the long third part of the book, In The Zone, which is the funniest.  And I went back to read certain episodes here and there over time. But I'd never spent the time to rewalk each step carefully through the whole thing again since my too-rushed first read.  Until now.  I've spent the last six months re-reading Gravity's Rainbow bit by bit.  And I've decided to officially call this my third full read of the book, although it could be the second, the fourth, or - one could argue - the first, since time and memory struck much of the book in the intervening years, while time and experience leant me a new perspective.

So, I've been assuming that if you've read this far done, you have some context for Gravity's Rainbow, but if not, here's a brief summary of the unsummarizable: the novel takes place at the end of WWII and is set in England, liberated France, and thereafter in the fractured Germany and other parts of Central Europe.  The central figure of the novel is Tyrone Slothrop, an American intelligence soldier who was subjected to Jungian conditioning when an infant that makes him particularly susceptible to the, well, mystical properties of V-2 rockets as an adult.  Like Benny Profane in V., Slothrop is a chaotic stumbler towards truth, and the deluded servants of order, represented by Pointsman in this novel and Stencil in V., cannot resist attempting to use him as a tool.  That's an oversimplification, but I'm trying to keep it simple here. Although Slothrop is the central figure, there's many, many, many other characters in Gravity's Rainbow, and often Slothrop has nothing to do with with action in a given episode.  Okay, the episodes: the book is split into four parts: (1) Beyond The Zero, which takes place in England during the Blitz in the last months of 1944, (2) Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering, which takes place at a casino in liberated France in the first months of 1945, (3) In The Zone, which takes place in Central Europe, primarily the former Germany, in the middle of 1945, and (4) The Counterforce, which leaps all over Europe and America and forward and backwards in time, but most of the "present" action takes place in late summer/early fall 1945.  I mentioned the mystical aspect of rockets.  Much of the latter two sections are about a search for information about a unique rocket, the Swartzgerat ("black device"), which is symbolically important for reasons that are unclear to most of the characters.  Much of the story deals with the idea of sacrifice, the symbolism of the Tarot, and the importance of Jungian archetypes (for instance the story of Hansel and Gretel plays a key part in the meaning of the Swartzgerat to those who fired it). The meaning of the Swartzgerat's target, though, is essential to the structure.  Each of these parts are divided into episodes, set off by an elliptical sequence of boxes.  The episodes have a particularly cinematic feeling to them.  As in film editing, they often have no literal connection to the previous episode, but derive meaning from their sequence.  I suspect that this summary will leave those with little knowledge of GR more confused than before, but I don't know how to be more clear with this book.

So yes, it's a little challenging.  But it's beautifully written, even in the ugly parts.  And it's funny as hell.  Often.  Not always.

I spent the first part of 2009 reading Against The Day, Pynchon's 2006 novel about the world changing during the Progressive Era in the years leading up to WWI (although the novel mostly ignores the war itself and continues into the post-war period, which I suppose could also be considered the time leading up to WWII). Against The Day was published 33 years after Gravity's Rainbow, and many readers see it as a prequel.  I don't think that's fair, though.  Pynchon's interests have changed over time: instead of being about how technology turns magic into reality (which is my one-sentence, completely insufficient thesis statement for Gravity's Rainbow), Against The Day is about how science drains the possibility of the natural world into a determined reality (again, yes, insufficient, but there you go).

Against The Day opens with the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, which drew crowds (in the novel, at least) hoping for technological miracles to free them from the misery of  their everyday lives.  The opening chapters introduce the Chums of Chance, one of several outdated escapist fictional threads that the novel employs to show how the avenues of escape have closed with the advent of the Industrial Age.  In Gravity's Rainbow, the magic of the Tarot became the reality of the archetypes haunting Europe after WWII.  In Against The Day, the magic of pre-20th century utopianism (represented by the aether, the hole through the middle of the earth, the Chums of Chance, the promise of freedom calling to the anarchist miners, the possibility of other worlds suspected by the mathematicians, and so on) becomes impossible in the light of science's cold eye. 

The Chums of Chance are a crew of children who travel by airship (the Inconvenience) to various adventures, guided by the mysterious Central Command.  When the novel focuses on them, the tone is generally light and utopian, at least at first.  Other threads in the novel include trevails of the widespread Traverse family, which include anarchist utopians and Western revenge dramas and pre-War European intellectual bohemianism, the threat of the Vibe family, the classic robber barons who have fingers in everything, and the impotent machinations of the British mystical society T.W.I.T.  The scope is epic, and characters in the novel cross the entire world, even going to a Counter-Earth at one point, although most of the threads wind up in dirty old L.A., where the advent of the movies leads to a noir-ish bleakening of the tone.  And I haven't even mentioned the major thread of Merle Rideout and his adopted daughter Dally, who have the most tender relationship in the book.  Nor have I pointed out that Against The Day is utterly hilarious, although the funniest episode may be the early sequence when Franz Ferdinand - the doomed Crown Prince, yes - attempts to engage some of the black citizens of 1890s Chicago in a round of The Dozens.

The nature of light and dark is of keen importance throughout the novel, and much of the action is governed by light. Of particular importance is Iceland spar, a mineral that refracts light into two places: one sharp and one ghostly.  Characters in the novel call this "bilocation," and one of the threads involves being literally in two places at once.  An explosion (a blast of light) tears one character, Lew Basnight, from his current reality and thrusts him into another.  Extrapolating from this, the bombs of coming wars - especially WWI, so terrible that Pynchon's characters can hardly even conceive of it - tore reality asunder.  Light also plays in smaller subplots, such as Merle Rideout's obsession with the Aether or the way that Scarsdale Vibe shuts down Nikola Tesla's plan to harness geo-energy to provide free heat and lighting for the masses.  According to one of the inscriptions - a quote from Thelonious Monk, from whom I borrowed my son's middle name - "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light."  Light is not just the way out of ignorance, but the way out of certain types of potentiality.

I think Against The Day is as good as Gravity's Rainbow, if not better.  Maybe it's silly of me to talk of one being better than the other, because they are of a piece.  ATD couldn't exist without GR.  But GR is augmented by ATD.  Re-reading GR's paranoid urgency in the light of ATD's wiser flights of fancy flips their relative time frames and makes it seem like there is a way out of the Zone.

Upon finishing Gravity's Rainbow, I knocked out Jonathan Lethem's most recent novel Chronic City in a couple of days.  Lethem shares with Pynchon a sense of paranoia and an affinity for absurd names.  It's unfair to Lethem, though, that I would pick up one of his novels on the heels of one of Pynchon's.  Lethem may be one of the greatest American novelists of his generation, but Pynchon is one of the greatest American novelists. After Pynchon, Lethem seemed lighter than usual.  The novel is about an actor, Chase Insteadman, who befriends a prickly pop culture critic named Perkus Tooth.  The two spend hours smoking weed, watching movies, and so on.  Their circle widens.  Tooth becomes obsessed with an artifact called a chaldron, which leads eventually to their discovery that much of their reality isn't quite as authentic as it seems.  There are multiple surreal touches, such as the artist who creates enormous gaps in the Manhattan landscape or the two-story tiger destroying unwanted housing or the encroaching environmental collapse that the characters hardly notice.  And yet I finished the book thinking ...and?  Again, this is my fault, not Lethem's, but Chronic City seemed awfully slight after Gravity's Rainbow.  What wouldn't?

Note: the image at the top of this post is from Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, illustrating the immortal phrase Ficht Nicht mit der Raketemench!

Congratulations to Maud Newton!

I'm just catching up on the news from last week that my pal Maud "Supafly Lit Chick" Newton won the 2009 Narrative Prize for her novel excerpt, "When The Flock Changed." It's a killer story, from what I am sure is a killer novel-in-progress, so go read it.

The Moviegoer Part IV: July - August 2009

Part four in the six-part series documenting my entertainment consumption in 2009! Not many movies on this one, though. As you can see, when picking up from last time, I've been reading more over the last two months and thus neglecting the movies. Let's dive in, shall we?

Movies viewed:

82. Monsters, Inc.: A-

83. The Wages of Fear: A

84. The 39 Steps: B+

85. Un Flic: B

86. Only Angels Have Wings: A-

87. The Passion of Anna: B+

88. The Limey: B+

89. The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith's Anthology of Folk Music: B

90. Pinocchio: A+

91. The Incredibles: A

92. Ponyo: A

Books read:

Faulkner - The Hamlet

Roald Dahl - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Jon Holmes - Rock Star Babylon

Jeff Roesgen - Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

Rob Sheffield - Love Is A Mix Tape

William Bolitho - Murder For Profit

Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

Tom McCarthy - Remainder

Thomas Pynchon - Against The Day

I had just finished Faulkner's The Hamlet last time. I think I failed to mention that I was also reading Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my four-year-old son. In early July, I read Jeffrey T. Roesgen's excellent 33 1/3 book on the Pogues' Rum, Sodomy, and The Lash. Also read: Jon Holmes's Rock Star Babylon, Rob Sheffield's Love Is A Mix Tape, and William Bolitho's Murder For Profit. Read about them here. In late July, I read Lippman's What The Dead Know and McCarthy's Remainder. Read about those here.

I spent all of August reading Pynchon's Against The Day, which I have yet to review here. But I will and soon. I'm trying to decide if I like it better than Gravity's Rainbow, which is like trying to decide whether I better like having ears or fingers. Which has led me to start reading Gravity's Rainbow again, and maybe I'll have to wait to finish GR before I'm ready to talk about ATD. We'll see.

Here's my previous Moviegoer entries.

Reading Rainbow Roundup: What The Dead Know and Remainder

Two more books I've read recently:

What The Dead Know by Laura Lippman. This is the first of Lippman's many books that I've read, and it was definitely zippy. I'm not a mystery reader, which is Lippman's primary genre, so I know Lippman mainly because of her association with David Simon, the man behind The Wire and Generation Kill (and Lippman herself has a brief appearance in Season 5 of The Wire). Now, I'll grant that it's a shame that this is my primary association for a writer of Lippman's fame, and some may go to a place of sexism or genre-bashing, but, to be fair, I also think first of The Wire when I think of Dennis LeHane or George Pelecanos, who are both arguably more famous. Anyway, self-defense aside, Lippman is, as I said, a zippy writer, and I plowed through this book quickly without really meaning to. In the story, a woman appears from nowhere in North Baltimore, a little shaken from a car accident, claiming to be one of a couple of teenage girls who vanished some thirty years prior. The Baltimore Homicide Department gets involved, and the book leaps around in time as they attempt to uncover who this woman is while she reflects on her past. My main issue with the book was that I figured out her secret almost right away, while the stone-cold professionals in the Baltimore police never even considered the possibility. The narrative kept me hooked, though, as I wanted to find out a) if I was right and b) why she kept this secret. Glancing at the review in the NYT, Janet Maslin apparently didn't figure out the secret, so maybe it's just that I'm a suspicious reader who assumes that the author's game doesn't involve outright deception, but merely sleight-of-hand. And as sleight-of-hand goes, it's a decent trick.


Remainder by Tom McCarthy. Where Lippman's book was a fun diversion, this book was Nabokovian effort. Which isn't to say that it was a hard read, because like many of Nabokov's books, it was a quick and effortless dash. In fact, I think I read it quicker than I read What The Dead Know. But Remainder is wresting with some deep philosophical problems through the eyes of an increasingly unreliable narrator, and McCarthy manages a neat trick of writing everyday surrealism that reminds me of one of my favorite movies of the last few years, Synecdoche, New York, all of which means that I absolutely loved this book. The book is a first-person account of a man who has been in a terrible accident, something falling on him from above, although he doesn't remember what. In fact, he's lost a lot of memories, as his brain has been damaged. In one of the clever passages, he describes how he's had to learn to use his right side again by rerouting information through his brain, which is a key to the strangeness to follow. Having received a tremendous amount of money from his settlement, he's unsure what to do with his life until he accidentally sees a crack in the plaster at a friend-of-a-friend's party, which triggers an intense memory that might be a vision. He uses his money to recreate his vision in real life, turning a building into an exact replica of what he knows (and the parts he can't construct with his mind are left blank, including the face of the concierge), with people hired to interact with him in mundane ways (so the woman playing the concierge must wear a hockey mask). Since his accident, he's been unable to feel real, and he longs for what he considers an authentic moment. These tiny interactions make him feel authentic. And the narrative gets considerably weirder from there, as his brain damage and money and singular obsessions lead him further into utter insanity, which may also be a form of shamanic holiness. McCarthy is excellent at reproducing this mental state. I felt insane while reading this book. I still feel a little insane from it. Any book that can wiggle into your mind like that is a book to take seriously.

Reading Rainbow Roundup: The Hamlet, Rock Star Babylon, Rum Sodomy & The Lash, Love Is A Mix Tape, and Murder For Profit

Since all I do here now is blabble away about music, I thought I could raise the stakes and natter about books, too! Yeah! I had some down time recently that I could spend reading, and I leapt at the chance to do so. So here's what I read:

The Hamlet - William Faulkner. This is the first of the Snopes trilogy, and although I've read a bunch of Faulkner's novels - many over & over again - this was the first time I had read this one. And it was a blast. Faulkner obviously was having a hell of a great time writing it, stuffing some of his trademark poetry into a sequence about a retarded man's physical love for a cow, for instance, or spending 20 pages delving into the backstory of a minor character just so he could abruptly cut to his murder by shotgun. Although this story was so great that I sort of wish that I had read it many years ago, I'm also happy that I didn't read it until now. It doesn't break the hold that the Compson stories - especially Absalom! Absolam! - have on my imagination and heart, but it adds to my appreciation and awe of Faulkner's work, and it's a great thing when you can find something new to love about an author you've considered among your favorites for nearly 20 years. I'm going to add the next two Snopes novels (that's The Town and The Mansion) to my list, but I'm not going to rush into them. Hell, it took Faulkner 17 years to get back around to the Snopes story, and as I'm entering middle age, I find that I'm not in as much hurry to get there as I used to be, either. Funny how you want to slow down when time is starting to rush by faster, getting more and more precious, but that's life, baby.

Rock Star Babylon - Jon Holmes. From the awe-inspiring to the awful and insipid in one small step. Most of what I know about Holmes is that he's a British radio DJ, and I would guess from this book that he's a lad-mag-loving shock-jock type. See, he takes a great idea: he's going to tell the apocryphal stories of rock music à la Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, because they're fun and schlocky regardless of their truth. But Holmes is really, really, really fucking lazy. The book reads like he knocked it out in a couple of days with minimal research and the dipshittiest humor that just cracks up his buddies and sycophants. By which I mean every page is packed to the gills with queer panic jokes. Because, I suppose, if one doesn't think that homosexual men and women are inherently hilarious (because they're gay! Get it?) then one must (ha ha ha) be uptight or something. Or maybe - and I'm just throwing this out there - maybe it's just not very funny.

Rum, Sodomy & The Lash (33 1/3) - Jeffrey T. Roesgen. But, see, here's a guy writing about music who has not just a working brain and a work ethic but moreover can write like hell. Jeff Roesgen's 33 1/3 book is about the great Pogues album, yes, but it's also a well-researched work of fiction built around the cover art, a modified version of Théodore Géricault's painting Le Radeau de la Méduse with the band members' faces superimposed over the faces of the men on the raft. Here's the story of the Medusa, for your reading pleasure. Roesgen tells the story from the point of view of a musician - Jem from the Pogues, if I'm reading it correctly - who has sailed with the Medusa with the rest of his band (who are, indeed, the Pogues) and who ends up on the fateful raft after the captain stranded the vessel in open seas. Along the way, Roesgen pauses his narrative to talk about the songs on the album. I found the novella quite affecting and the analysis enlightening. I've read some complaints about the use of fiction as a way of discussing music, but I clearly don't give a shit. And neither does Roesgen, and thank god for it.

Love Is A Mix Tape - Rob Sheffield. Sheffield's day job is reviewing music and other aspects of pop culture for Rolling Stone, but this memoir dates to his life before his writing success, when he was a grad student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He fell in love with a girl - a fellow DJ and aspiring writer - and then he married her. They lived happily for a few years, and then she suddenly passed away from a pulmonary embolism one day while they were at home together. Christ, the horror. Sheffield frames his story around a series of mix tapes that he made or she made for him, which incidentally (and poignantly) captures how important mix tapes were us music geeks in the pre-CD days. The girl he loved: I should say something about her, because he writes about her so beautifully and clearly. But it's hard to do so, because that's really what the book is about, introducing people who never got the chance to meet her to the girl he loved. I'll say that her niece, who she unfortunately never knew, is my son's best friend at their preschool. And after reading this story, I can see a lot of the aunt in the niece, which is also a little beautiful and poignant. I told her mother, who clearly misses her sister, that I had read the book, and she sent me this, an article that she called Love Is A Virgin, which further illuminates how unfortunate we all are that her time was so short. I read this book just after a funeral, my wife's beloved grandmother, and I also couldn't help but feel for my wife's grandfather, a widower now like Sheffield, and how horrible it is to survive, to suddenly have a person-shaped hole in your life.

Murder For Profit - William Bolitho. This one was a recommendation from Leonard Pierce, and bless him for it. This is a fictionally-written nonfiction take on several serial killers in history, written in 1926 by a guy whose real name might have been Charles or William Ryall (the web is unclear on the matter), and GODDAMN could this guy write. The whole book can be taken as an attempt to profile a serial killer in the early days of psychology with the variable results you may expect, but Bolitho's wit and style carry him through the stories. If you have the patience to read it online, here's one of the chapters, a section on George Joseph Smith, who murdered a number of women in 19-teens England in a money-making scheme that recalled the gritty/horrific movie The Honeymoon Killers. Consider some of Bolitho's lines here:

• "Truth loves economy; there is no need to make her a fool, or him a genius."


• "It is an act, a corporal violence, like the thong of a whip laid across her face, the apparently senseless, but by no means causeless, worrying of a sheep by a vicious dog. The passivity, the meekness of this educated woman had aroused some other nameless devil in him besides his biting fear-born avarice. Other dupes were to him only jumping figures in a cash-book. This most unhappy woman was to him flesh and blood. She had landed on the island of his egotism; he was afraid he was not alone."


• "The way of a murderer and a boa-constrictor are opposite. Where the one sweetens with his saliva, the other must carefully contrive to hate." [This is my favorite.]


• "At thirty-eight a woman's affairs are her own concern, and seldom easy to tell."

It's out of print, but there's used copies to be had on the cheap from Amazon. Avail yourselves!